Explore Atmel Studio, debugWIRE, avr-gdb, simavr

[brunofalmeida]

Atmel Studio: The official IDE for AVR devices.

debugWIRE: An on-chip debugging interface for AVR microcontrollers.

gdb/avr-gdb: This is a useful tool for desktop applications to step through a program, set breakpoints, inspect variables, etc. This might only work on a simulated AVR device though.

simavr: A program to simulate an AVR device.

Explore whether it's possible for us to use one or more of these tools.

Stages (might not do all of them, but 1 and 2 are the most important):

1. Using the Atmel ICE programming board and Atmel Studio, get any program uploaded onto a board (likely an example program from Atmel). Test out debugging with debugWIRE breakpoints, stepping through instructions, and viewing variable values.
2. Use Atmel Studio to upload and debug a program from one of our repositories, probably one of the examples/manual tests in lib-common. I think Atmel Studio has some sort of feature where you can specify your own makefiles. Document what changes we would need to make to our makefiles/build system to convert them to use Atmel Studio debugging.
3. Try to simulate a microcontroller in Atmel Studio (if it supports that).
4. Try to simulate a microcontroller in simavr and use avr-gdb.

[brunofalmeida]

It seems that the 32M1/64M1 are not supported by the Atmel Studio simulator.